News--AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) Undergraduate Consortium
At the 2021 AAAI Conference,
I recently co-Chaired the AAAI-21 Undergraduate Consortium,
an opportunity for a selected group of undergraduate scholars to meet peers and professionals, and to receive mentorship and resources to help
in pursuing a career in AI research!
News--WIREs Cognitive Science Journal
I have recently joined the Editorial Board of WIREs (Wiley Interdisciplinary
Reviews) as the Computer Science and Robotics Editor for
WIREs Cognitive Science. I'm very excited to be part of a group that
promotes the communication of important Computer Science and Robotics
research in a forum for the Cognitive Science community!
News--A New E-Book
Along with colleagues John Long (Vassar College) and Stéphane Doncieux (Université Pierre et Marie Curie), I have co-edited a Frontiers Research Topic called Evolvability, Environments, Embodiment & Emergence in Robotics.
In November 2018, this research topic was published as a new ebook, free to download! I hope anyone interested in this fascinating interdisciplinary area will check it out!
Research Interests
Robotics, Interdisciplinary Computational Sciences, Computational Modeling and Simulation, Artificial Intelligence, Hybrid Dynamical Systems, System Verification, Cognitive Science
CV/List of Selected Publications
My CV is available in PDF format.
Some selected publications, indicative of some primary interests:
- Dynamical Intention: Integrated Intelligence Modeling for Goal-Directed Embodied Agents.
Eric Aaron
Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 17 November 2016.
https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2016.00066
- Understanding the U.S. Domestic Computer Science Ph.D. Pipeline.
S. Hambrusch, R. Libeskind-Hadas, and E. Aaron.
Communications of the ACM, 58(8), 29--32, 2015.
- Multi-robot foremost coverage of time-varying graphs.
E. Aaron, D. Krizanc, and E. Meyerson.
10th International Symposium on Algorithms and Experiments for Sensor Systems, Wireless Networks and Distributed Robotics (ALGOSENSORS 2014), 22--38, 2014.
- Integrated dynamical intelligence for interactive embodied agents.
E. Aaron, J. P. Mendoza, and H. Admoni.
Third International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, 296--301, 2011.
- Dynamic obstacle representations for robot and virtual agent navigation
E. Aaron and J. P. Mendoza.
Twenty-fourth Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, LNAI 6657, 1-12, 2011.
- Action selection and task sequence learning for hybrid dynamical cognitive agents
E. Aaron and H. Admoni.
Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 58(9), 1049-1056, 2010.
- Hybrid system reachability-based analysis of dynamical agents.
E. Aaron.
Innovative Concepts for Agent-Based Systems: Second
International Workshop on Radical Agent Concepts, LNAI 3825,
233-244, 2006.
Research Focus: Adaptive Intelligence and Hybrid Dynamical Cognitive Agents
My research interests are centered on models and applications of adaptive, dynamically responsive intelligence in dynamic environments. My primary focus is designing and analyzing intelligence models for autonomous agents in complex environments, emphasizing hybrid dynamical system models--models that combine continuous and discrete system dynamics--and applications ranging from workplace courier robots to computer-animated guides through virtual worlds.
This research is motivated by goals for performance, design, and analysis.
- Agents' goals and behavior should adapt appropriately from experiences in their environments, such as a courier robot learning when two tasks it has been given are redundant.
- Agents should dynamically respond to immediate stimuli, such as a robot avoiding a collision with a moving cart or person in an office hallway.
- Agents' intelligence models should support clear design and rigorous analysis, for robustness and reliability in a variety of applications.
My hybrid dynamical cognitive agent research enables
dynamically responsive and adaptive intention-guided behavior for
goal-based systems, supports efficient collision-free navigation in
dynamic environments, and promotes the integration of levels of
intelligence that are often modeled separately--e.g., obstacle
avoidance and goal-directed action selection--in a formal,
unifying hybrid system framework for verifiable dynamic agents.
This framework can improve adaptation and overall performance, and it can
also support model checking-based system analysis of agent behavior.
Results from this research include several advances in adaptive intelligence and analysis:
- a new, dynamical system-based framework of dynamical intention for dynamically responsive, adaptive goal-directed behavior;
- a new reactive navigation method that succeeds at indoor navigation tasks that cause difficulties for other reactive methods;
- graph-theoretic analyses of robot networks and navigating agents;
- and model checking-based analysis of properties of navigating agents, such as a class of formalized, hybrid system-based metrics for the relative difficulty of dynamical navigation in various scenarios.
The Selected Publications noted above contain more information
about these research results and others.
Interdisciplinary Research Areas and Interests
My work also includes cross-disciplinary projects that connect to Cognitive Science or Computational Sciences.
Cognitive Logical Inference, Student Modeling, and Eyetracking
Before turning my attention
to intelligent virtual agents and animation systems, I
developed formalized mathematical tactics for cognitive
inference modeling.
I concentrated in particular on developing a model of undergraduate students
carrying out logical proofs in a structured framework, but the ideas underlying
the work are not student-specific. The many facets of this work are described
in my dissertation, Tactic-Based Modeling of Cognitive Inference on Logically
Structured Notation. I have also written papers on its components, which
range from logic and formalized mathematics (Justifying calculational
logic by a conventional metalinguistic semantics) to cognitive science
and eyetracking research (Insight into theorem proving via eye movements).
I am currently further investigating the eyetracking component of that research. (See the Cornell University Computer Science 40 Years booklet, pg. 24, for a small sidebar column about my eyetracking research!)
There is more information in the data collected during my dissertation
research than has previously been analyzed, and my current research with
Barbara Juhasz (Wesleyan University Department of Psychology) is a
more thorough exploration of the ways in which eye movements can
inform our understanding of the cognition and modeling of logical
problem solving. More than 668,000 frames of data are encoded for our
ongoing data analysis.
Computational Biology and Tumor Modeling
Simulations of tumor development and treatment are often computationally
costly. I worked with Ami Radunskaya (Pomona College Department of Mathematics) and others to improve their
efficiency by developing modeling and simulation methods that incorporate dynamically sensitive variable scaling, enabling greater detail at critical areas without excessive detail at mundane tissue.
This application is strikingly similar to applications that arise in
both the system verification and intelligence modeling aspects of my
agent modeling work. In my verification research, efficient
yet accurate metrics of relative navigation difficulty may be
enabled by state space decompositions with a greater density of
states around critical locations (e.g., obstacles, targets) and a
sparser distribution in other areas. In my intelligence modeling research,
such variable scaling techniques can relate closely to models of
perception for animated characters: Because some element of the
simulation of an intelligent virtual agent possesses perfect world
knowledge, realistic characters must attend to only relevant stimuli
in the virtual world around them, requiring efficient focusing of
attention on specific points in space. This, in turn, involves
intelligently spending less processing time (perhaps none at all) on
irrelevant locations while performing detailed analyses on relevant
ones, which is the essence of my tumor modeling research.
My collaborators and I are presenting our method for tumor simulation and its behavior in various modeling contexts, and we then intend to extend this work with our variable scaling approach, demonstrating of how biologically inspired notions of practical simulation
equivalence can lead to new criteria for evaluating biological
simulations and, by extension, faster simulation methods.
Other Noteworthy Publications
- Modal Logic Semantics
One way to avoid difficulties with partial functions is by
employing the notion of underspecification. In modal
logic S5 and some semantically related logics,
underspecification preserves validity, so incorporating
underspecification into their semantics does not change the
classes of valid formulae. A formalization of
underspecification and results for these modal logics are
concisely presented in Formal justification of
underspecification for S5 (co-author: David Gries).
- The Monty Hall Problem
The notorious brainteaser "The Monty Hall Problem"
(also called "The Three Doors Problem") is the source of much debate.
Would people be more likely
to correctly perform the underlying mathematics if the puzzle were presented
in a frequency format rather than a probability format?
Would people be more likely to arrive at the correct answer?
Results are reported in Frequency vs. probability
formats: Framing the three doors problem
(PDF version) (co-author: Michael Spivey).
This paper is also extensively quoted on pages 149-151 of the book
The Monty Hall Problem (Oxford University Press, 2009).
- Nuprl
Most documentation about the Nuprl automated reasoning system
has been written from an "insider's"
perspective. I used the system but was not involved in its
development; I have a user's perspective. My A
User-Level Introduction to the Nuprl Proof Development System
(PDF version) was solicited by the Nuprl
group at Cornell University.
Non-academic stuff
Music is one of my most important non-academic interests. I
have written about music (album reviews
and features), broadcast as a jazz DJ (a weekly
commercial radio show), and played in a few rock bands
that successfully made it out of the garage.
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